Frontiers of Appropriation and Capitalist Environment-Making
This is a book about traps. It is a book about the ways in which the exploration of possible worlds has been constrained by the promises and processes of technological modernization. It is a bottom-up look at how social processes can be liberated from what appear to be capitalist permanences. Railways are among the most enduring visible structures of industrial capitalism. Whether we celebrate their past glory, mourn their present state or dream of their glorious future, railways are easily recognized as privileged instruments in the struggle to conquer space and enlist time in the service of accumulation.
The problems addressed in this book all revolve around one central proposition: the more capitalism strives to free itself from its productive base, the more it relies on the violent conquest of space. Capitalism today, I argue, shows an increasing disposition to operate in the infrastructural mode. The sharpening of capitalism’s internal contradictions is expressed in an increasingly desperate attempt to break through the limits to accumulation by employing technologies of circulation and exchange across space and time. From a capitalist standpoint, these technologies appear as infrastructure. Infrastructure is a privileged instrument for sustaining capitalism’s promise of the frontier: the commitment to reach that which lies outside the currently known, and the assurance that capitalism is the social, economic and political arrangement most likely to tame the unknown to our advantage. Technological dynamism has always been central to capitalism’s relentless drive to go further and faster, to the point where the two could be said to be synonymous. High-speed rail (HSR) is nothing new in this sense: this second coming of what is generally regarded as the central technology of the industrial age speaks to the resilience of the promise.
Infrastructures, I argue, are technologically enabled solutions to overcome the frictions of distance. The current infrastructure boom is part of capitalism’s ongoing attempt to revolutionize the qualities of time and space in order to enlist them in the service of accumulation for accumulation’s sake. The rise of HSR, a landmark transport technology of recent decades, expresses both the inherently expansionist nature of capitalism and the internal contradictions of the contemporary form of capitalist spatio-temporality. HSR is a quintessential technological fix: it is both an instrument for absorbing surplus and a tool for accelerating its extraction. But if the railways of the industrial era successfully revolutionized the objective qualities of space and time and came to define capitalism in its now classic form,1 a study of HSR reveals the painful transformations that accompany capitalism’s declining ability to revolutionize the objective qualities of space and time. One of the traps this book seeks to avoid is the confusion of crisis with stagnation. The infrastructure boom shows us that the crisis of capitalist reproduction and the consolidation of capitalism’s internal barriers need not appear as periods of deceleration. The frenetic search for reducing the turnover time of capital is an active moment. The generalized deepening of the processes of creative destruction that accompany the consolidation of financial capitalism is not a silent cry, but a deafening howl. For some, it might sound like a triumphant march and for others a deafening roar, but what is certain is that no one is getting much sleep.
A series of related propositions accompany the back and forth between the concrete and the abstract in the analysis I am undertaking. In the narrowest sense, what follows is a historical ethnography of the development of Spanish HSR. In the broadest sense, it is an attempt to understand the role of a specific technology within the nature-transforming project of contemporary financialized capitalism. There is not a single lens through which I view a given empirical object, but rather a series of windows that I open to capture an emerging reality. The main purpose of this introduction is to clarify the logic by which I move from one window to another, and the stakes involved in reconstructing HSR as a composite object. This book is as much about trains as it is about the built environment and capitalism as an environment-making force. It is also an analysis that seeks to avoid the trap of limiting anthropological research to a tool for mapping variations of the concrete. Rather than worry about the limits of anthropology, I prefer to use the term ‘historical ethnography’ to designate the shifting ensemble of methodological and theoretical tools in the service of illuminating historical movement and capturing it at the level of experience. The analytical process that unfolds in the following pages moves back and forth between two theoretical objects: the HSR-finance complex and the HSR-modernization nexus.
The HSR-finance complex refers to the way in which a particular technological configuration is put at the service of capital accumulation. It is primarily a way of designating the circulation of capital in a particular phase of the cycle of capitalist accumulation and the role that technology and technological innovation play in it. The bundle of processes that I identify as the HSR-finance complex represents the interlocking determinations that, to paraphrase Wolf, ‘set limits’ and ‘exert pressures’ on historical movement.2 By the HSR-modernization nexus, I mean the ensemble of social relations through which the subordination of social reproduction to capitalist imperatives is kept in place. The latter is not the abstract logic of the motion of capital, but the historical process through which specific capitalist relations are reproduced. Both concepts are heuristic tools, but they do not arise from the same necessity.
Through the HSR-finance complex, I aim to capture the incorporation of a specific technology into the capitalist mode of production and its role in reproducing the contemporary structure of accumulation, in order to reveal those political-economic phenomena that ‘underlie, orient and constrain interaction’.3 The HSR-modernization nexus, on the other hand, is situated at a different level of abstraction and, to borrow Wolf’s formulation again, ‘takes its starting point from real or imputed interactions between people’.4
Before moving on to a succinct summary of the building blocks of the analysis, I must address one of the book’s pressing silences: the absence of the word ‘infrastructure’ from the title. This is a word that has repeatedly fallen out of and found its way back into provisional titles, and I have finally decided to exclude it for two reasons. First, my analysis is intended to show that infrastructure, in relation to the movement of capital, is a category of appearance – that is, it is the visible, temporarily stabilized form in which certain processes are expressed. As such, the task is to go beyond this phenomenal form and reconstruct it as a historical product. There are too many pitfalls in accepting that infrastructure can function simultaneously as an emic and an etic term.5 The omission of the word ‘infrastructure’ is therefore an active silence; it is meant to signal the end result of a long process of engagement with HSR using the tools of historical materialism.
Second, the fate of this book has been such that its subject matter, in the narrowest empirical sense, has gone from the nerdy to the fashionable. This book is a partial instantiation of a research project that is now more than a decade old. It began as a research project on the Spanish railways, labour organizing and historical memory, and at the time all these words placed me more firmly in what must have appeared to many as the tedious workerist camp. As I try to bring this project to some kind of conclusion, the word ‘infrastructure’, like the railways themselves, has risen from its own ashes (and as it peaks, the misuse of the concept already points to the exhaustion of its latest call to fame). Panel titles and publication keywords attest to the hyperinflation of the term. In this sense, the refusal to use it may appear as a welcome break to those who have maintained their suspicion of this inflation, or as a slightly frivolous move to those who are convinced of it. To treat it as derivative also implies a refusal of the pressure to sell old questions as if we had just stumbled upon them, a refusal of the pressure to succumb to the cannibalistic tendencies of academic production, where everything is better devoured than acknowledged. The relevance of the questions I raise in the following six chapters lies not in their novelty, but in their enduring importance. The selection of theoretical resources I draw on acknowledges recent developments, but seeks to reaffirm the continuing importance of those intellectual tools that have too often been declared obsolete under the pressure to declare one’s work singular rather than indebted to long chains of research and reflection.
We are living in a time of enormous acceleration in the restructuring of the landscape.6 Much of this environmental transformation has taken the form of an infrastructure boom.7 This, it has been argued, is the rise of infrastructure as a new asset class.8 Alternatively, others have insisted that the most salient feature of the contemporary infrastructure boom is not so new; after all, we are mostly witnessing the renewed strength of a debt-financed Keynesian model of infrastructure development.9 However we choose to conceptualize the public-private divide in relation to infrastructural development, it remains clear that the material assemblages we call ‘infrastructure’ are playing an increasingly prominent role in the geographical configuration of contemporary capitalism.10 HSR is part of this configuration. It is, I argue, one of the technological assemblages that best reveals the heightened contradiction between capital’s tendency to free itself from spatial and temporal constraints, while at the same time increasingly producing them.
The more finance capital becomes the dominant form of capital, the more necessary and violent its rematerialization becomes. The tendency to reduce the socially necessary turnover time of capital,11 which is most strongly expressed in the dramatic reduction of the turnover time of finance capital, is accompanied by an increasing immobilization of capital in the landscape. The age of finance is also, as never before, the age of concrete.
Beyond capitalism’s dream of dematerialization, we find the frenetic production and voracious consumption of space. But if the process of absolute expansion of capitalism has characterized this regime of accumulation since its inception, we are also in the presence of more recent phenomena. The current infrastructural boom is less an expression of capitalism’s tendency towards absolute expansion in space than of the conditions under which it can survive when threatened by the exhaustion of its possibilities for absolute expansion.12
The reality that I delve into in the following six chapters begins with a basic fact: Spain is currently the European country with the longest HSR network; in the world, it is second only to China.13 While images of Japanese HSR or the French TGV have become mainstays in the symbolic repertoire of technological modernity, few would think of Spain as the country of such a technological feat. Spain’s superfast trains remain more of a pleasant tourist discovery: ‘Oh, did you know that you can get from Madrid to Malaga in less than two and a half hours?’ While the Western imaginary of Spain is still firmly dominated by the usual clichés about the European South, within Spain HSR, commonly known as AVE (Alta Velocidad Española – Spanish High-Speed Rail), evokes a different set of images. The most important part of the AVE’s development, from the inauguration of the first line in 1992 to Spain’s firm position as global leader in number of kilometres of HSR in the late 2000s, unfolds over the years of the rise and fall of the second Spanish miracle.14
Bolstered by the promises of modernization associated with EU accession, the rise of this impressive network evokes both its mirages and its disappointments. For the believers, it remains proof of Spain’s legitimate aspirations to a leading position in a global economic and political hierarchy. For the disappointed, it confirms Spain’s inability to rise above its culturally ascribed condition of marginality. For the openly critical, it remains evidence of the country’s endemic struggle with corruption. Whether hailed as a success or denounced as an aberration, this outstanding network has convinced both supporters and critics of its exceptionality. The analysis that I undertake confronts this pervasive representation and offers an alternative reading: this remarkable project expresses not deviations from a normal path of development, but the innermost contradictions of Spain’s insertion into a global regime of accumulation and the corollary international division of labour. Far from being a deviation from the rules of the capitalist game, it is a manifestation of the unfolding of its contradictory logic.
In what follows, I reconstruct the history of the development of HSR in Spain by tracing it between the two poles of what I have termed the HSR-finance complex and the HSR-modernization nexus. This involves moving back and forth between different levels of abstraction, a process through which I try to understand what the development of Spanish HSR can reveal about capitalism operating in the infrastructural mode, but also the way in which HSR becomes a sui generis force of transformation. The challenge is twofold: on the one hand, to situate the development of Spanish HSR within global dynamics; and, on the other hand, to understand those singular processes that unfold locally and regionally, leaving unparalleled furrows in the lives of those living in a given place at a given time. The bulk of the book is devoted to the latter, but the former is equally important to the overall analysis. These asymmetrical tasks are embedded in a number of important assumptions, the first of which is that in order to talk about the development of HSR, we need to understand the current infrastructure boom as a specific form of capitalist environment-making.
If infrastructures, minimally defined, can be treated as ‘built networks that facilitate the flow of goods, people or ideas and allow for their exchange over space’,15 or, to put it differently, if they represent the ‘architecture of circulation’, then infrastructures are essentially tools for the production of space, which, following Neil Smith, I treat as a ‘corollary of the production of nature’.16 Taking capital accumulation seriously as a socioecological process requires us to understand capitalism’s technological selection and the specific role that infrastructure plays within it. Infrastructure and accumulation are not in a contingent relationship, and, as the case of Spanish HSR shows, the infrastructure boom is an expression of the particular problems facing the contemporary reproduction of capitalism. As the pressure to dispose of surplus capital increases, certain technologies and forms of intervention into the environment are more likely to take centre stage. The Spanish boom in transport infrastructure is, I argue, an expression of the acceleration of the production of relative space and the contradictions inherent in it.
The current era of the dominance of finance capital is also a period ‘in which the core socio-economic relationship with nature is being dramatically transformed’.17 The exhaustion of possibilities for absolute expansion has resulted in a frenetic search for new technological fixes, and the infrastructure boom is part of this process. The result, I argue, is not only an accelerated consumption of those resources we conceive of as ‘primary nature’, but also a dramatic acceleration of the transformation of what has been called ‘second nature’.18 In other words, capitalism is becoming increasingly cannibalistic in its relationship with the built environment. As the promise of the external frontier fades, the processes of creative destruction accelerate. This means that the inherited geographical spaces through which capitalism unfolds are becoming redundant in ever-shorter cycles. But since capitalism in its infrastructural mode depends on the immobilization of ever-increasing outlays of capital in space, the physical barriers it erects are becoming more spectacular. This time it looks like the frontier is a concrete wall.
HSR is not an accidental participant, but a fully responsible accomplice in the spectacular rate at which land in Spain has been converted to urban use.19 But, conversely, if we want to understand the massive transformation of the landscape that has marked the last thirty years of Spanish history, we must not only consider HSR as an infrastructural object, but we should also explain it as a phenomenon that is integral to the circulation of capital, as a moment in this process. Placing infrastructures as instruments for overcoming the frictions of distance requires understanding them as part of broader processes of ‘making and unmaking of successive historical natures’.20
The claim that HSR is a privileged environmental technology in an era of financialization is substantiated in the book’s six chapters, all of which open different windows onto the relational spaces from which HSR emerged and produced. The title of the book was born out of my first reading of Jason Moore’s Capitalism in the Web of Life, which proved very thought-provoking as I tried to think of infrastructure as technologies for the production of the environment.21 The language in which I express my analysis of HSR as a technology for the production of space in an era of financialization echoes Moore’s account of capitalism as ‘defined by frontier movement’.22
However, in attempting to develop an analysis of infrastructure as an aspect of the socioecological dimension of financialization, I have found his argument that ‘external nature’ remains at the heart of capitalism’s geographical praxis unconvincing. Rather, I argue that capitalism is indifferent to the origins of its inputs: accumulation for accumulation’s sake results not only in a dynamic of external colonization, but also in the constant threat of internal obsolescence. Faced with absolute limits, capitalist accumulation mercilessly tears apart the spaces it has engendered.
This book is the result of more than a decade of research on the transformation of the Spanish railways in the post-Francoist period. In the first half of the 2010s, I began researching the liberalization process, with a particular focus on the role played by the production of historical representations in it. The resulting Ph.D. dissertation formed the basis for the research I subsequently carried out on the development of the Spanish HSR project.23 Most of the research for this was conducted during my stay at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology (2016–19). Subsequently, I conducted follow-up research and continued to pay attention to related developments as I further developed my thinking on the relationship between infrastructure and capitalist environment-making processes. Some of this research has materialized in a series of publications, covering aspects and research problems that represent both early formulations of some of the questions raised here and more detailed engagement with the ethnographic cases.24 The epistemological foundation of the book is provided by historical ethnography, which is understood as a concrete research practice anchored in the postulates of historical-geographical materialism. Methodologically, this has meant drawing on a wide range of tools.
My early ethnographic research on the national railways, which brought me into dialogue with railway workers, administrators, trade unionists, bureaucrats and policy makers, opened up those spaces beyond the institutional framework of the railways and led me to conduct ethnographic research in Ciudad Valdeluz, a so-called ghost town built around an HSR station 60 km from Madrid, and Euskadi (the Basque Autonomous Community), where the main opposition movement to the AVE unfolded between the 2000s and early 2010s. As other practitioners of historical ethnography have remarkably shown, historical ethnography, in its insistence on capturing the ‘living, complex and contradictory substance’ of everyday life,25 also requires that testimonies about the past and archival resources be approached with an ethnographic way of seeing and listening.
The genesis of a book is usually covered in a split manner between an introduction and the traces left in the acknowledgements. The former is supposed to present a coherent process of research that justifies inclusions and exclusions, while the acknowledgements remind us of the concrete circumstances that have made a book possible in a particular context. But in presenting this book as a historical ethnography, I find myself forced to fold back into the introduction some of those in the acknowledgements section. Frontiers of Appropriation is the result of a way of understanding and using historical ethnography as a mode of inquiry that refuses to relegate history to the background of the present and instead recognizes it as two synchronic moments, ‘one in the past, the other in the present’.26 I have been trying to practise this mode of inquiry while acknowledging that there is no definitive resolution to the complex interplay between historical process and historical narrative27 and the task of correcting the gross underestimation of ‘the size, the relevance, and the complexity of the overlapping sites where history is produced, notably outside of academia’,28 is an open-ended endeavour that begins anew with each new or old research question that is raised anew.
I have acquired the insistence that lived experience can only be illuminated by allowing it to gain historical depth through inclusion and participation in a space that has often been described, and has sometimes referred to itself as ‘the anthropology of class’. From within this space, Don Kalb, in his relentless insistence that there is more to experience than meets the eye, cultivated in me the irreversible concern for the possibilities of an ethnography freed from the straitjacket of the present, one in the service of a notion of class that ‘dynamizes culture and deinstitutionalizes power’.29 When I decided to begin research in Spain, a country where I had never lived before, he also put me on the path of a series of meetings that would indelibly leave their mark on the way I carried out research.
These meetings were sometimes encounters with books. Long before I knew I would write a book about Spanish HSR, I read Susana Narotzky and Gavin Smith’s Immediate Struggles: People, Power, and Place in Rural Spain.30 Ever since then, it has always been clear to me that the way I think about the major historical events in twentieth-century Spain, the multiple dimensions of place-making, and the classed character of social reproduction are inextricable from this book. What was less clear to me is just how deep the layers of such an encounter were. When re-reading Immediate Struggles in the final stages of completing this manuscript, I found that the concerns which I thought I had acquired through my interest in critical geography must have been stoked by it. Such is, for example, one of the central concerns of this book, the relationship between fixity and movement in processes of spatial differentiation.
Another such encounter that one can later not extricate herself from came at a much later stage (insofar as the writing of this book is concerned). Having already carried out the bulk of the research for my own book, I read Jaume Franquesa’s Power Struggles: Dignity, Value, and the Renewable Energy Frontier in Spain.31 In Power Struggles I found both an example of how to carry further an anthropological lineage that has decisively shaped me, and inspiration for how not to feel constrained by it. I read Power Struggles as a highly accomplished analysis of the mutual constitution of class and environment-making practices across scales. Behind and beyond these books, there are myriads of other encounters, traces of which are probably in my writing, traces that I might not always fully understand or acknowledge. But these two books, as works that not only reclaim a way of doing historical ethnography that refuses to segregate reality into research objects artificially isolated by disciplinary boundaries, but also employ it to make sense of Spanish realities, are my most consequential instances of propaganda by the deed. They also represent, in my reading, outstanding demonstrations of how to study the classed character of social reproduction while engaging with the ‘changing vectors of power that ensure the ongoing extraction of surplus value from people’s labour’.32 From within the space of the anthropologies of class, I bring to this book a search for the ‘traces from which collective strengths could be reconstituted’ and the political insistence of a radical historicism that refuses to accept that the way things are is the only way things could have been and the only way they can be.
Frontiers of Appropriation is divided into three parts, each consisting of two chapters. Part I, ‘Limits to the Market’, analyses the conditions under which the massive flow of capital into this specific infrastructure project became possible. Chapter 1 develops the concept of the ‘HSR-finance complex’ and shows the links between a national project and the supranational circulation of finance. It also situates the HSR project within the broader Spanish infrastructure boom of recent decades, a process that has led to an unprecedented transformation of the built environment. Chapter 2 links this particular turn in infrastructure policy to changes in the transport market. I do this by going back to the origins of the AVE in the 1980s. It is here that we can identify the building blocks of the ‘HSR-modernization nexus’ and the political projects to which they were subordinated. The HSR project was born in the midst of a process of reorganization of the public railway company in the wake of Spain’s accession to the European Union (EU). Led by a nominally socialist33 government, it has long been seen as a break with the Francoist railway. Against this dominant view, I argue that the turnaround in investment in the 1980s is embedded in a vision of transport planning that has been struggling for hegemony since at least the 1960s. Taken together, these chapters emphasize two important conclusions: first, that the dominant interpretation of state retreat in contemporary infrastructure investment is not supported by the evidence – the penetration of capital into the infrastructure market remains fully dependent on state intervention; and, second, that the long quest to solve the ‘railway problem’ and revolutionize the transport market has failed. What appears to be a success from the point of view of infrastructure policy, namely the development of Europe’s longest HSR network, is at the same time a resounding failure to transform the existing mobility paradigm.
Parts II and III of the book focus more closely on the ‘real or imputed interactions among people’ that make up the lived experience of HSR development. Part II, ‘Limits to Consensus’, traces the ways in which the development of HSR has gained the support of workers and the forms of resistance it has encountered. Using the case of two unions, the train drivers’ union Sindicato Español de Maquinistas y Ayudantes Ferroviarios (Spanish Union of Train Drivers and Assistants – SEMAF) and the railway section of Confederación General del Trabajo (General Confederation of Labour – CGT), the majority sector of Spanish anarcho-syndicalism, I analyse the ways in which the AVE inherited and developed the anti-labour character of the wider process of post-Francoist railway modernization.
Finally, Part III, ‘Limits to Development’, extends the analysis of the relationship between transport infrastructure and contemporary urban and territorial models. Chapters 5 and 6 contrast an urban environment built in the image of the AVE with the regional environment that has given rise to the most important struggle against Spanish HSR. Ciudad Valdeluz, an urban development project built around the new HSR station for Guadalajara, 60 km from Madrid, is one of the country’s most notorious ghost towns. Life in a place advertised as ‘Spain’s first city built from scratch’ reveals how the expansion of the urban frontier facilitated by HSR is based on the rationalization of differentiation and exclusion, but also what it means to inhabit a place built on a failed promise of connection. Chapter 6 provides an overview of the struggle against HSR in the Basque Autonomous Community. It shows how investment in HSR seeks to rework spatial relations perceived as inimical to the accumulation of capital. Against the dominant narrative of HSR that views HSR as a Spanish nationalist project, the chapter reveals the points of convergence between national and subnational developmentalism. Through the case of the struggle against HSR in the Basque Country I reveal the way in which coercion outweighs consent in the development of HSR.